Dark history: A visit to Japan's creepiest island

Exploring 'James Bond' island – Made famous in the latest James Bond movie, "Skyfall," Hashima Island is home to a ghostly uninhabited collection of apartment blocks -- all are ruined and crumbling.

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Exploring 'James Bond' island – Hashima, off the coast of Nagasaki in western Japan, was opened to tourists four years ago but access is strictly limited.

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Exploring 'James Bond' island – Archive photograph from before World War II shows the steep stairs leading into the warren of apartments inside the huge housing blocks on Hashima.

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Exploring 'James Bond' island – The same staircase captured more than half a century later.

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Exploring 'James Bond' island – Japan wants Hashima recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site but South Korea objects due to its association with wartime slave laborers.

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Exploring 'James Bond' island – Miners descend down a mine shaft on Hashima -- the last pit closed in 1974.

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Exploring 'James Bond' island – The water in the baths was always black because the miners would jump in fully clothed at the end of a long day.

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Exploring 'James Bond' island – Archive photograph from the 1960s shows children playing in the stairways of the apartment blocks. At that time the population density on the island was among the highest in the world.

For almost 100 years, Hashima was a mining facility run by corporate giant Mitsubishi.

The mining community was housed in some of Japan's and the world's earliest concrete high-rises.

On this tiny 16-acre plot of land, high-rises were the best option for housing.

By 1959, the island was one of the most densely populated places on earth, with 5,259 people living on just 18 acres.

But by 1974, gas had replaced coal as Japan's major fuel source, Mitsubishi pulled out of the island, workers found jobs elsewhere and Hashima was left to rot.

According to the Nagasaki City Council, location scouts from Skyfall's production team spent several days on the island but decided it was too dangerous to film there.

Instead, sets duplicating Hashima's eerie wreckage were built in Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom.

Security for visitors

Visitors who are given permission must wear hard hats and have an escort from Nagasaki's city council.

Additional caution is necessary -- balconies and railings are long gone and a wrong turn up the "stairway to hell" to the rooftop can lead the unwary visitor to narrow pathways between buildings with perilous drops on either side.

Those who think they remember the way down from a climb to the top of the structure -- a small, wind-blown shrine remains there -- can find themselves in rooms with gaping holes in the floorboards and sheer drops to floors below.

Ghost town

Although Hashima was by no means abandoned overnight, it feels as though it might have been.

In the school, exercise books and broken abacuses lie in corners where sea winds have blown them.

Sheets of X-rays scatter the floor in the hospital, with faded imprints of miners' lungs still visible.

Children's shoes dot ruined pathways, as though their owners lost them while running to evacuate.

It feels a bit like Pripyat, the town adjoining Chernobyl, where residents really did leave in a hurry after the town's nuclear reactor exploded in 1986.

Weird stories

There are plenty of tales of weirdness surrounding everyday life on the island.

A guide who works at Gunkanjima Concierge, Tomoji Kobata is one of the three tour operators who lead trips to the island.

Although Kobata lived on the island for only a year in 1961, he's full of stories.

From the water, he points out spots where lovers would climb onto the island walls to watch the sunset, seeking out the smallest bit of privacy in a place where privacy was a rarity.

"No one would lock the door. There was an old woman called 'Watchdog' who checked on everyone who came in and out and would know everyone's business."

Kobata also talks about the darker side of Hashima's past.

Before and during World War II, Hashima, like many industrial sites in Japan, was a location for forced labor.

Korean and Chinese prisoners of war were kept here, enduring varying degrees of hardship.

Conditions in the mines were grueling.

Workers were subjected to heat and humidity with very little to eat and beatings if they slacked.

According to local records, 123 Koreans and 15 Chinese died on the island between 1925 and 1945.

Hashima is one of several industrial sites awaiting inclusion on UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites. South Korea, however, has formally objected to the island's petition for recognition due to its association with wartime slave laborers.